


Now There's That Fear Again

by Sensorielle_Envie



Category: Mortal Kombat (Video Games), Original Work
Genre: Animal Abuse, Experimental Style, Explicit Language, Gen, Natalie Clifford Barney - Freeform, Sapphic Poetry - Freeform, Surreal, Writing Exercise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 12:31:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20930273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sensorielle_Envie/pseuds/Sensorielle_Envie
Summary: A series of drabbles, writing exercises, shortfics, and whatever else comes to mind.





	1. Monday, April 23

The pillow picks up a lazy percussion, this breath a skipping stone over pillows pressed.  
Ascending blanket lungs.  
Descending ideas.  
Flash velocity.  
Thoughts of something… victorious.  
The house he grew up in appears… or rather, un-vanishes. Stacked like diamond red cards, rather. Spaded ebony chips, rather. Erebus is there, every strand a lively curl on his head, but he’s younger than he’s used to. This is a time when monsters were in basements, his blankets had names, his hands hunted hidden cookies when on the coldest winter day the chocolate chips in his mother’s heated mitt spoke through his nostrils, only to be drowned in lilac-white milk. He has a folder.  
“They call him the Lion,” Erebus says to his dream. “Lion Volk, Lion People, Lion.”  
His mother doesn’t believe him.

(I’ve seen puddles of stone undone,  
abyssal tremors tremble when abysms impede suns  
and something I have seen waits.  
To the undone—have I weight?  
What, son,  
have I waited for?)

He bleeds the folder out, paper guts on the table.  
Newspaper clippings.  
The organs of black paper.  
“The Lion can see the beasts,” Erebus says. “The Lion can see them all.”  
And in the clippings depicted are pictures of a man. A man with limbs rodent hairless and unkempt, stumped and ungrown while being also taller than the tallest giant. Hueless wired eyes wider than fireworks. Eyes that really look into the camera. Thinnest of pink lips, peach fuzz, burnt toast teeth. He stands under mermaids hooked at the breast, their palates limp and eyes rolled back. He stands by the beautiful Indian tiger goddess, a rifle at its captive snout—the photo after is inhuman. Then he stands by a starving wood nymph, her son a pile of rib skin beside them, and in his lap a lasting bite of roast.  
The Lion smiles. Mustached and inside, the Lion smiles.

(Ever unseen, the guttural growls enlarge and grow  
like sun-fucked cucumbers… )

“Do you want another cookie?” asks the mother to her son. “They cannot eat themselves.”  
“No,” Erebus shakes his head. “I have eaten enough cookies and swallowed enough milk to be happy.”  
“But I have made them for you, these cookies!” the mother insists. “And I have taken the calves’ milk so you might have it instead! There are always hungry babies, my son, but not mine.” She kisses him on the cheek, the scent of makeup and lipstick like babysitter leathers. “And we will eat our steaks tonight with Neptune’s fork on cowhide slabs and horns will hear us chew.”

(Cradled in rock, the earth reclaims you.)

The variegated glasses of the living room let rainbow colors in, stained with images of stars and elder things. Tea peach torsos, ivied webbing, one limb sewn to another. Windowsill cactuses bloom above their fat bodies, giving rounded orchid purples to the bookshelf and making the air smell like bubblegum and cherry soda. Many comforts can be had in this comely silence, until two mice make their squeaks in evening dust-heavy light. On whatever crawling journey they embark, the mice meet a pair of resting shoes that seem to have been waiting for a very long time—since then do shadows ride in the night.  
The Lion is here.  
“Is that you, beast hunter, in my house?” But the effect of Erebus’ inquiry is like a nail’s iron _tap_ against a fish bowl. Nothing. The stranger picks up the older mouse, a little wriggling fur of a thing, then the baby mouse by its slender pink tail. He makes it watch.

(Nary a wine  
my death may be diluted by.  
Nary a hunter if never a beast becomes.)

Dark adolescent pearls are the screaming murine eyes entrapped in the Lion’s ghastly fist, knuckled over claws frantic and agitated kicks. He hovers the older vermin over a sharp wooden corner of the coffee table, hums out a rustic folk song, and harshly scrapes its naked belly. And one tragic hum indeed, for to it the rodent gags and belches, wails and screeches, fur splintered and plucked. The mother mouse tries to resist, tries her god-given teeth to brake this agony of pendulous motion—they break away in pulp-rotten shards, several in her choking mouth. Rash red, until to a great push… the torso bursts in his hand, dangling reviled.  
A phantom wheeze burps in the baby’s face. The master hangs her innards above the child.  
“Look,” he smirk-whispers. _“Lights.”_


	2. Anxietas (or, The First of These Drivels)

I kissed her under the streetlamp in winter.

We held each other in front of the train station, and I remember this particular quivering in my chest. Maybe it was the December wind—I am thin and a coat only promises to me so much. But that sensation wasn’t nausea, wasn’t anxiety or sickness or oncoming syncope. I had finally seen light. I had been made immortal. The warmth of her hands departed then and I watched her freckles and sky-tinted eyes like beryl roam aflutter and turn away.

One night I suffered a terrible vision of what was to come. Some kind of death visited me. Still does on occasion, to which my only response arrests my wrists and I scream, to be momentarily calmed by… some distraction. The void revealed to me an end, and then I knew so certainly what awaited me after death. The world became so small, I smaller within its terraqueous globe. Then I began to retreat from death.

She listened to me. Through all of it her attention was given when I spoke about an abyss less than darkness and futility. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder; the way things must be perfect, an idea sharply forged on the first attempt… to think my efforts would be wasted on my emerald-eyed husk, it destroyed me. But she listened to everything. And she said something that made me feel like it was going to be okay.

But I don’t remember it.

Loudly my heart beat around her and I began to see the streams, the rhythm of her prismatic aura, and hum internally to what glorious ombre splashes the scent of her curls led my way. She read my poetry. She may’ve been the first to know about the idea that would later become Fable of the Monday. I told her everything—she validated me, so what reason had I to withhold?

I wrote so much, some of my best (as far as my own criticisms may travel). It wasn’t until my own inadequacies caught up with me that I understood how imperfect I was for her. How imperfect my words were. I had loved the idea of this girl so much I didn’t deserve to describe her, nor could I discover the terms. Suddenly she had been there all along, outside what omnipotent barriers beset me. This was light losing luster, this was a dusk horizon silencing the lid, this was impossible from the start. Then from the base of my troublesome brain accursed nothingness once again like deleterious volts rode along my nerves. I looked at Haedes, Alcyone, victorious Fauzia. Ruin appeared, more corporeal than before.

I didn’t write again for months. The world is a truly small place.

Sometimes when I eat I think about it sliding down my esophagus and putting me to sleep. I wish I had a lot of things, and I wish I truly believed that if I had them things would actually be fine. Often I fix meals for these dimes of grotesque wisdom—often I abstain too. I don’t weigh a lot. All things were made with fragility in mind.


	3. "Song of Endymion" by Natalie Clifford Barney

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Song of Endymion"  
(Trans. by Sage, “Chant D’Endymion” by Natalie Clifford Barney, first published in Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes in 1900.)

Diana my queen, flee all bitter things!  
To lightborne countries lead Endymion under a new aurora’s lustre,  
harvesting where certain is it hope-roses bloom;  
all that was irremediable and marred will through us reflect your endless garden;  
all that life labored and afflicted will flower by the ray of your smile.

Or if you remain with me, your prison will be a wall of my sweetness made,  
having for a dome the azure;  
to veil what I adore from evil, how so I adore you!, will I weave all my stallions aureate coats;  
to hide your shame far from the fierce eye will I weave a veil of kisses whence I speak.  
Sovereign moon, my mad goddess be,  
arrest in long embraces my verve and youth.

Diana, my queen so dulcet a chimera, carry my soul in ephemeral flight.  
Open your arms anew—there phantasies may I nestle.  
Deny no desire the perfume of your lips,  
nor my ecstasy a queen of caresses.  
Your voice, your sweet voice,  
enchantress music that makes you forget the leave of loveborne spasms  
and that even the moon falls into night!


	4. Cassius and Dante: An Exercise in Dialogue and Beats

“Fucking her in the ass is about the best thing I could tell you about her.”

Dante followed Cassius from the slope of pebbles that christened his leg muscles with sun-bit aches to the orchard. When his friend tossed him an apple red as wine, he looked over the cliffs and saw the sparkling sea. The gods were in there, he thought. Heard the seagulls too.

“I’m sure.” Apple crunch, golden fluid.

“Well she was boring otherwise,” jumping from the wooden ladder, leathers shaken. “Didn’t sing, could hardly dance. Had her nipples pierced like those desert folk have ‘em. Jewelry and all that. But her ass was round as a rose hip.” Cassius thrusted the air. “And she cried like a blue jay.”

“What’s a blue jay sound like?”

“A lot like a woman bein’ fucked in the ass, I think.” He readjusted his belt, tightening the buckle where it met his gladius. “But blue jays don’t sound like that all the time. It’s worms, right, what they eat? Makes their throat sound like a… like a woman.”

Dante wiped the sweat from his brow and took another bite. The apple was sweet, heavy and round; the summer made it taste better. Although no more than a grey work of antique masonry from this vantage, the fortress in the distance stood out amidst the citrus rooves of a nearby city, country hills and grooves.

“What’s a blue jay look like?”

Cassius blinked. “You’ve never seen a blue jay?”

Dante shook his head.

“Have you ever seen a cardinal? They’re like that. But blue.”

“I haven’t seen a cardinal.”

Stopped himself before his lips could meet the sweet fruit. Cassius sighed, placing his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “A blue jay’s got blue wings. Not as deep as salt water, not vaster than the sky. Try and think o’ that. White bellies made of clouds. A black mask over the eyes, a black beak. And it’s got _blue balls and a raisin cock _like you I’m sure!”

A smile, Dante had to smile at that.

A friendly wind came then, shaking the orchard and its ripe apple bells. There were several hundred trees over where the tides crashed against the ebon cliff, each nodding to the breeze. Little dreamers, little trees. Instruments of grass.

“But that there?” Cassius went on, pointing to the fortress. “That’s where Ignatius took your devil girl, and I wouldn’t put my cock near her. Not on my life.”

“Is that a common code for a sellsword?” Dante innocently questioned. “Does the domina not pay you well enough?”

“Number one,” on his fingers. “No actually, she really doesn’t. You don’t know what birds are. Pleasure you brought that up. And two, the gods and I might have a tumultuous pact, but I still respect a lord and lady where they reign. Never commit to the dark arts, the black magics. Never touch yourself to black magics. Never. Put your cock. In a girl with horns, or antlers, or whatever else.”

Thoughts of the ocean once more came to Dante. Brine, bubbles, blue chirps. Looks to his protector’s armor, a stolen sword, stolen boots from the coast. Looks to his own dirt-speckled shirt and the little knife hanging out his coin purse. Was it too much, this task? Still in his dreams he listened to thunder and witnessed goat men dance about cooking skinless people. It made sense and spoke to him. Flayed muscles and torturous decay, they spoke to him.


	5. The False Empress Sits in the Bathtub

The false empress sits in the bathtub.  
—  
Well, that’s not a very good start to a story, is it?  
Certainly not so captivating.   
“The detective kept his gaze made of steel on the shadows, lit only by the cigarette drag.”  
Now that’s a better start.  
Or maybe, “A swift persuasion of justice began the outlaw’s life, and it was his phantom horse, and his life will it also curtail.”  
There’s a built-in promise about shadows, about outlaws. Those I think are superior opening sentences. Since this is something of a hobby, I love a good premise; especially the kind whose promises are broken. I’m writing them down, too.  
But instead I paint a picture of the false empress in bath by the window.  
Roll in thunderous oranges and bleeding pinks.  
A wounded cerulean sky.  
Oh, but didn’t you know? The Outworld sun died billions of years ago.   
This one came from another dead place with who knows how many millenniums left.  
And it’s like that for Mileena.   
The flags of Edenia used to bolster this true aquamarine color. Really, if you took a good look at them you would say “How marvelous. A pretty blue daisy.” But her color is false regal—violet orchid purple. One could say it’s mangled, or more dramatically dyed in daisy blood.  
In any case, it can be said like so.  
Steam rising.  
A sigh.  
We know them as goosebumps, when a tiny muscle near the hair follicle contracts and makes the hair stand up. Goosebumps happen a lot when the body feels cold. Nervous, too. And when you step into a hot bath, the body knows itself to be a colder flesh balloon, thus the pilomotor muscles contract and here we are again.   
A shiver.  
Sunset.

She’s beautiful in pink vapor  
death stapler  
tooth coat of scarlet ink  
razor  
dream tailor  
rouge red bloom  
honey basket bloodletter

And that’s what goosebumps are, in hot water.  
And that’s what goosebumps are, in hot water.


End file.
